It was reported recently that in the UK, we throw away up to one third of the food we buy each week. This amounts to 6.7 million tonnes of food each year.

As the food crisis increases around the world, it makes sense for us to reduce the amount of food we waste. This will save us money too – imagine saving a third of your weekly food bill!

Food waste is caused by cooking too much and then throwing away the extras, buying 3 for 2 offers and not using things before they go off, impulse buys, poor portion control or mouldy fruit and vegetables.

Many people think that throwing food in the landfill is ok. It’s biodegradable after all, so doesn’t create problems. The trouble is, more often than not, the biodegradable food gets wrapped inside a non biodegradable plastic bag! If the air doesn’t get to the food then it won’t rot down.

In the absence of oxygen, biodegradable materials (such as food, cardboard and green waste) decompose and produce methane gas, which contributes to global warming.

Here are my top ten tips to help you reduce food waste.

Menu plan.

Think about the meals that your family enjoys most and make a menu plan for the week. Write down the ingredients you need for each meal on a list. There is nothing worse than pushing a trolley around a supermarket aimlessly with no ideas about your meals for the following week. You often end up with an expensive trolley full of ingredients that don’t go together!

Use up your leftovers.

Before you begin your menu plan, take a look at any leftovers in the fridge, vegetable rack and cupboards. Vegetables which are starting to go soft can be made into soup or pasta sauces. Over ripe fruits can be made into pies or blended to make smoothies. Half a tin of tuna could be tonight’s pasta bake and a few spoons of cooked mince could be made into pasties.

Write a shopping list.

Write a list from your menu plan and take it with you to the shop. If you stick to the list you’ll be more likely to resist impulse buys that don’t get used up.

Don’t shop when you’re hungry.

It’s a simple tip but an important one. If you shop when your stomach is growling, you’ll be tempted to buy all sorts of things you don’t need. Plus if you’re focusing on your hunger, you’re not focusing on making good choices.

Rotate foods in your cupboards and fridge.

When you get home from shopping, put all the new food at the BACk of the fridge and cupboards and bring last week’s old items to the front. How many times have you found something mouldy hiding in the back of the ‘fridge?

Take a look at what you throw away.

Be honest with yourself and start writing things down. Do you throw away half a loaf of bread a week? Then why not freeze it and take out slices as you need them. Take individual slices out for sandwiches the night before you need them, or use straight from frozen for toasting. If you regularly throw away vegetables then maybe you need to buy them loose and reduce the amount you buy each week.

Check your fridge.

Are the seals good and is the temperature set to between 1 and 5 degrees? This ensures your fridge will keep your food fresh for as long as possible.

Start a compost heap, a wormery or a bokashi bin.

If you regularly throw out gone off fruit and vegetables then why not turn them into something useful by starting a compost bin. They are easier than you might think to manage and there are a range of styles to suit all garden sizes.
Check out Recycle Now first to see if your council has a special deal on compost bins.
If you have a tiny garden, then you could try a wormery.
If you have no garden at all then why not try a kitchen composter, such as the Bokashi bin? A bokashi bin will even take cooked food scraps. Keep checking back on the site for an exciting competition to win a bokashi bin in the future!

Portion control.

It can be difficult, especially with children who eat like a horse one day and hardly anything the next, to serve the right sized portions. Why not let your family help themselves by taking a small portion with the knowledge that they can come back for more when that has been eaten? Any leftovers can be covered and stored in the ‘fridge once they have cooled down and used the following day.

Left overs and ingredients.

View today’s leftovers as tomorrow’s ingredients with a bit of creative thinking. A couple of sausages could be made into a pasta bake or toad in the hole, cooked vegetables can be made into bubble and squeak, a bit of pasta can be tossed with vegetables and some chickpeas for a pasta salad, a couple of rashers of bacon can be made into an omlette. The possibilities are endless; all you need to do is add imagination.

There is a great website that deals with this issue. The Love Food Hate Waste campaign aims to raise awareness of the need to reduce the amount of food that we throw away, and how doing this will benefit us as consumers and the environment.

On the site you will find plenty of recipes, facts about storing food and even suggestions about portion control.

What about you – what is the best recipe you’ve made from leftovers? Do you have a top tip to help reduce food waste?
Please share it with us in the comments below!

Share this:

I am a long time supporter of the Green and Sustainable lifestyle. After being caught in the Boscastle floods in 2004, our family begun a journey to respect and promote the importance of Earth's fragile ecosystem, that focussed on reducing waste. Inspired by the beauty and resourcefulness of this wonderful planet, I have published numerous magazine articles on green issues and the author of four books.

Comments (42)

Sites That Link to this Post

I remember a restaurant in Oxford called Browns that had a reputation for serving the largest meals on the planet! And yes, they were gluttonously huge but everyone liked it because they felt they were getting ‘more for their money’ In fact most of the diners left about half of the meal, because it was too much to eat. Now, I wander what happened to all that waste? was it recycled onto the next customer plate, or was it thrown away as waste? Either option is a violation of decency and only adds to the problem that we think it’s ok for our ‘eyes to be too big for our belly’ Food waste due to unrealisticly large portions in restauants is often a deliberate ploy to make us feel better about the bill because we have stuffed ourselves silly. It is immoral when so many people are going without enough food to stay alive.

Mr Green, you’ve hit on one of my major bugbears. Food waste collection is a difficult business for commercial premises and I have read about some who have installed their own facilities such as wormeries. However what I would love to see in restaurants across the country is more modest portion sizes, perhaps not cordon bleu proportions but something that was adequate for most people.

“But (LOL) there’s always the Doggy Bag in the meantime ;-D”
True and in the US and Cnanda the doggy bag is no embarrassment. Unlike here where we feel almost ashamed to leave something then ask to take it home. Some of these archaic english attitudes have to change to reflect the new environmental needs that surround us.

I glazed over for a moment there, thinking about how it would be awkward to be given a non-sustainable doggy-bag, and whether therefore it would be better to go out to dinner with a little lock and lock type box tucked in your bag for that over generous pate or fish portion… :o)
I can’t help but think it’s a great idea – last time I went out for a meal I did bring half a portion of pate home, but wrapped in a napkin which was a little awkward and eminently temporary!

I also concur with the main issue – I’m not a big fan either of the ‘big plate’ eaterie, I find the oversized tableware needlessly intimidating and a bit uninviting.

On the other end of the scale, my MIL likes to make sure the fridge gets a decent portion of every meal – something we’ve joked about while we still imagine we can eat it all – and she’s excellent at turning it round for the next day in the form of a bake or bubble-and-squeak type dish. As one of the generation a bit lacking in the basic skills I wish I was as confident in whipping up a sauce to bind everything into a meal.

Oh what a gorgeous idea, Kris – a lunchbox in your bag for leftovers 😀 These ideas bring up all sorts of ethical dilemmas don’t they? You really do have to retain a sense of humour about it all otherwise it becomes overwhelming and paralysing.

I’ve been looking out for some notes I took in a pub several years ago. I just had to whip out my notebook and pencil and write down one of the meals that was on there because I couldn’t believe my eyes at the time. I found it this morning when doing some housekeeping on my computer (at 4.45am no less )

When I notice things in the fridge that are geting a little close to the best before date, i put them at the front of the second shelf down. It’s at eye level, and you can’t help seeing it everytime you open the fridge. I then know what needs using up, and when thinking about what I am going to cook, I already know what some of the ingredients will be!
When food gets pushed to the back and hidden, it is so easy to forget about it!

I’ve mentioned this on other comments but thought I’d do so here as well.

I freeze any individual portions of leftovers and then either Dh takes them to work for his lunch (he has access to a microwave), or every approx 6 weeks we have a “leftovers night”. The portions are all brought out and we get to pick from the array on the table; so you may have a spoon of lasagne, half a sausage, spoon of mash, spoon of veg.
If I don’t think there is enough veg then I will either do a bowl of salad or a portion of veg, (which as is freshly cooked can be frozen if not all used)

For brunch yesterday there was only myself and Dh, there were some new potatoes leftover from the previous nights tea, so i cooked a couple of sausages and chopped, fried off a couple of chopped mushrooms, and the potatoes chopped fairly small, mixed all together in a pan and added a couple of beaten eggs, made a lovely fritatta style omelette which served with brown sauce hit the spot just right and used up the potatoes.

maisie, your idea is really good, plus it means your dh has a decent meal at lunchtime (which means he’ll probably snack less).
I love throwing together all sorts of weird combinations. That was how I found out that pieces of potato and rice fried in butter is so delicious!

You seem to have minimal food waste down to a fine art. I’m good with things in the fridge, but I must admit, that once they get to the freezer, they tend to get forgotten.

perhaps a freezer inventory is in order next month too.
Fritatta sounds good – really comforting and filling 😉

Sunday – Roast (piece of boiling bacon cooked with the veggies)
Monday – Boiled Bacon
Tuesday – stew using the leftover joint
Wednesay – shepherds pie or something like
Thursday – Sausage and mash
Friday – Fish of some sort
Saturday – would be either a fry up brunch or a bacon, potato nad onion casserole.

There never seemed to be any waste and we had puddings at least a couple of nights in the week.

Mum would get up extra early on a Monday once a fortnight and have a mamouth baking session (she wasn’t working then); these would last us for the whole 2 weeks with a fruit cake being kept wrapped in tinfoil to use in the last few days when all others had been eaten.

Obviously these were the times when if at school you got a cooked school lunch every day so there wasn’t a problem with packed lunches, although my dad did have one.

I shop once a month and yes make a list, get everything on the list first and if I want anything extra, I get it then.

I do a monthly planner, weekends are for the leftovers.
I freeze anything that will freeze and even make my own tv dinners with smaller leftovers.

I was raised on “Waste not Want not” and know the difference between want and need.

Also, always keep a list on the inside of your cupboard door which lists the cans of veggies you have, check off whenever you use one, so that when you go shopping again, you only buy to replace. Do the same on the side of the fridge.

hi cagney – welcome to the site. Monthly shopping sounds intriguing. I like the idea of it, but I’m not sure I’d be very successful. I must admit though; I think I would save money and perhaps make things last longer. The list on the cupboard doors is a great idea and another thing for my procrastination list – the same with the freezer. It sounds like your routine works really well for you. Thanks for the prompting. 🙂

@Mrs Green: Thank you for the welcome…looks like we may be the only ones here.

It is very easy to shop once a month as I have been doing it for over 20 years.
I have learned that there are somethings I can not afford and have adjusted my meals to suit that.
I grew up learning from my grandma to waste nothing and if possible to grow anything you can and use it all.
Your yard is a salad if you know where to look.

I have grown tomato,green peppers,lettuce,cukes,watermelons and a number of other things on my very small plot of land.
But the best that grows from nature are the dandelions, and make the best salad or fried with garlic, onion and eggs,salt/pepper to taste.

I have found no where these days to pick my own mushrooms nor wild rhubarb.

These are great tips. I have just reorganised my fridge (as Mrs Green suggested) so that things which need using are on the top shelf. The sauces and pickles are in the salad box, and the veg / salad are on a shelf so I can see what we have.

If you want to reduce your food waste I would suggest you do this simple experiment.
1. Get a tub (an old ice cream tub for example) and decant all your food waste into it.
2. At the end of the day weigh it before putting it in your bin.
3. Keep a tally and add up at the end of the week.

This has really opened my eyes to what I have been wasting on a regular basis – in my first week my landfill food weighed 1980g for a family of 5. I did not count any wasted fruit / veg / peelings which I put in my compost heap.

I am now on week 2 of this experiement and I’m hoping for a massive improvement!

Food waste? What’s that? I have a freezer! Anything left in my organic RIVERFORD!! vegbox at the end of the week goes in the freezer. Cabbage in season can be boring, so it gets cooked, [finely shredded white cabbage,fry butter with shredded onion, then the cabbage,add shredded coconut,powdered cumin,chopped almonds,cook in its own steam] and freeze in portins for two. Many other things are frozen raw and made into soup,[curried mixed veg soup, carrot and parsley or coriander, spiced parsnip, vichissoise].
Bread is always frozen and used slice by slice, and not a scrap leaves the house. Leave old bread or crusts aside for 2 days, beat up in the mortar & pestle, keep in screw-top jar. Use as crisp grilled topping on mac-cheese,cauli-cheese, or mixed into burger ingredients, or mixed with soft cheese,spring onions& a little cream and stuffed into the top of garlic-butter-fried big mushrooms.
There are always potatoes left as we have mostly pasta or bread, no meat-&two-veg, so they get boiled up, mashed, frozen and used as potato cakes,pie-topping,thickening for Cullen Skink or other soups.All left-over rice goes to the freezer for stir-fries, usually I boil twice what I want just for the freezer.
My children always got small platefuls and more if they finished rather than throw away.
I am helped by my Council [Colchester] which takes all plastic,paper, tins[mostly tomato] and bottles [mostly wine!] and by my compost heap. I use 1/3 of a black bag a week, but in summer, put it out every week. I am really interested to read other people’s waste-not ideas. When I was younger and had 3 children at home, it was cheaper to stay home, doing the cooking, DIY,clothes-making,gardening and CHILD-CARING than to go out to work. I invented the Home-Holiday, where we all went out all day to places within 1 hour’s drive, out to lunch, and out in the evening with the help of neighbour baby-sitters. We were not by any means poor, but that was nearly normal in our Yorkshire village in 1970. I have a university education and teach the violin. What does this word BORED mean?

@Cagney57: Cagney, I’m so sorry I missed your last message. I loved what you wrote about the dandelions; most people see them as a ‘weed’ to be eradicated, but I love to see the sunny little fellas providing food right there in the lawn.
Maybe you’ll have some luck later in the year with mushrooms 🙂

@Sharon: Hi Sharon, great to see you here – thanks for posting your comments and sharing your tip. I’m glad the fridge reorganisation appealed; you’ll have to let us know if it works for you.
it’s great to bring awareness into things by actually weighing our waste. It seems an odd thing to do, but knowledge is power.
I’m wishing you lots of luck this week – be sure to holler if you need any support or suggestions for using up leftovers 😉

@Mrs Ingrid Ehrlich: Hi Ingrid, I love your comment – and that cabbage dish sounds delicious (so does the idea for the bread crusts – thank you!) You have lots of innovative ideas which really appeal to me and your home holidays sound wonderful. I bet your children have plenty of beautiful memories to share.

I feel that so many people do not see the lovely things on their own doorsteps. I seriously give thanks every day for the place we live. In the field at the back of our hose are horses and a shallow stream running through – it’s full of wild flowers and safe enough for Little Miss green to explore. I say, nearly every day that people pay money to go on holiday to a place just like this – we are so lucky!

@Mrs Ingrid Ehrlich: Hi,
For me it is cheaper to stay at home now! I bake in the morning, garden in the afternoon, make cards, knit, sew etc. I have been making my own bread now for around 30months, and on the very rare occasion when we have bought bread, nobody eats it! I make bread crumbs form homemade bread, whizz them up with a hand blender and freeze them in 50g bags.
We too do holidays from home, we are National Trust members, so have lots of free day trips, and the Forest of Dean is right on our doorstep. We don’t go out to eat though, we all enjoy homemade food so much that going out to eat is not really a pleasure, also being vegetarian I am still looking for a good veggie restaurant!!
Yes, 2 words that don’t exist for me are Bored and Television! I don’t have time for either!!

@sharon. I like your idea of putting all food waste in a box. I don’t have any food waste!! I have a hungry husband and daughter that always eat up the left overs!! Also have chickens and a compost bin, so nothing ever gets wasted.

@Mr Green: There is always the option of taking a doggie bag home to eat the leftovers next time you’re hungry. I know loads of people who do that thus not wasting food and getting a good value for their hard earned money.

@Vanessa: Hi Vanessa; that’s a good idea. I like the thought of it, but don’t know if I would be too embarrassed to actually go through with it.
No reason why you shouldn’t though .. Would be interesting to take your own container too and ask them to fill it 😉

Hi, In my opinion, there are two types of food waste. One that is thrown away before we eat it, and another type is food waste that we over eat. Food waste that we throw away can be from left over food, spoiled food or kitchen waste as we prepare food. When we over eat, we eat food that our body do not need and this is a waste, a wastage of food.

Left over food, spoiled food and food that we over eat can be managed but not kitchen waste. To manage kitchen waste, I use a specially designed compost bin that compost the kitchen food waste into fertilizer for my garden. In this way, I have stopped disposing my kitchen waste into the bin for the last 3 years.

I currently have 2 batches of liquidised leftovers in the freezer that I have labelled as ‘Gloup’. When the winds of winter are bashing on the door, I will take one out, spice it up a bit and serve it for junior and I as soup at lunchtime 🙂

@David: I think portion control is one of the most valuable tools in reducing your food waste. Until recently I was weighing our food waste (the non compostable stuff that was going to landfill) and was horrified how much was there each week. I now weigh most of our portions out, especially things like rice and pasta which is very easy to overestimate.
I don’t want to be guilty of wasting food, but I don’t want to end up fat either!!

Hi, All food waste is organic and it can be composted. That is how I managed to stop disposing it into the bin and then landfill. Over eating, letting food spoiled and/or disposing left over are bad. The amount of greenhouse gases released from the development / growing of food is huge and out weigh the greenhouse gases from landfill. We therefore need to eat to live but it does not mean that we cannot eat tasty food and enjoy it. Over eating also affects our health and life style. So buy, cook and eat what our bodies need.
Poppy has provided an interesting tip, which is storage of food. Many people let food decay because they do not know how or not bother to correctly store food for future consumption. Let’s us here from you if you have any food storage suggestion.

@David: David, Katy Wok Stanley over on the Non Consumer advocate wrote about food waste caused by over eating this week and it’s a very important issue to think about. I’ll be adding my own thoughts to this at some point because she raised something I had not considered before, yet I cannot get the idea out of my mind since she planted that seed.

@Poppy: Poppy this is something I need to pay more attention to. I do my ‘you’ll find it in your soup’ recipe once a week, but if I can’t get through all the leftovers I think they will be wasted. I should make more use of my freezer like you have suggested – thanks for that!

@Sharon: Hi Sharon; it’s great to hear what has worked for you with reducing food waste. I still tend to cook whatever because I’ve now becoming much better at using up leftovers; but it’s great to hear which tips work for different people.

@Mrs Ingrid Ehrlich: @Mrs Ingrid Ehrlich: I may live in the USA but my Yorkshire heritage shines through. We are on the same page as far as food usage goes. Nothing gets wasted and my daughters always loved leftover dinners. Now there are only two of us at home I still cook for and from the freezer, composting all unusable food trimmings.

@susan edwards: Hi Susan; thank you for leaving your comment. Great to see your Yorkshire roots helping you to reduce food waste. We love our leftover dinners too! Some things were just made to be reheated and enjoyed the net day!

We’re having to re-learn what was second nature to our parents and grandparents. ‘Waste not, want not’, ‘Dig for victory’, and ‘Make do and mend’ weren’t just slogans dreamt up because there was a war on; a lot of it was common sense. I remember my parents fridge always contained a selection of left-overs along with fresh home grown produce.

@Eco Money Saving: I agree with you; so much of this is simple common sense and respecting resources without wasting things. It’s a shame people think this is a ‘step backwards’ but often once you show them financial savings it begins to be an attractive proposition!

@Mr Green: I don’t go by portions any more so what I would pay more for in a restaurant is: service, cleanliness, quality of the ingredients, quality of the actual cooking and decor in that order. I would try to avoid restaurants which serve in large portions as I’m female, sedentary and middle aged so don’t need them. I also want to lose a lbs in weight.

@Almost Mrs Average: My mum told me that when she used to dine out before I was born women were given ladies’ portions and had to pay the same as men. Why not introduce slimmers’ portions for men or women who want to either lose weight, have a sluggish metabolism, not that hungry or who don’t have the money on them for a large portioned meal. And you pay 3/4 of the price of the normal meal.

Children’s meals are out of the question as they get a different menu.

I don’t make menu plans for the week as I don’t usually stick to them. I have no idea what I’ll want to eat four or five days’ later. However if something’s running low I write it on a shopping list and add to it for the next few days and then go shopping for food.

Was going through my kitchen cupboards a week ago and found an opened packed of rice pancakes and had to throw it out as it had been open for several months. I could have torn them into pieces and used them in soups as filler.

Here in the US the server will always ask you if you would like a “to go” container for food left on your plate. It is expected that that food will be taken home and warmed up later. I am Native American and in our culture waste is looked down upon. One thing I do is freeze any food that is left over imediately after dinner. Because, so often if you put it in the fridge it goes bad before you use it. We have these little 4 oz plastic containers so after dinner each night I would take what ever portion was left and put it in one of those. When my daughter was in pre-school she had a mircowave in her class room. I found that 3 of these containers were just right for her lunch. So I would just go through the freezer and pull out 3 of those containers that made a meal. One might have chopped up chicken, one mashed potatoes, one peas. Her teachers were very impressed with her lunches.

another thing I do with those little bits of veg you know a few tablespoons of this and that. I put them all right in the freezer and after I get enough of them I will take them all out and make soup. The tastiest soup I ever made actally had some leftover macoroni and cheese in it.

also there is a budget pizza place here. We pay $5 for a pizza. If you order breadsticks they come with a container of marinara sauce. Since its the same price with or without the sauce. I take the sauce though we don’t eat it with our breadsticks. I put this in the freezer too and use it either in my homemade soups or will add it to pasta sauce when I make that. Or I will use a flour tortillia and make my own pizza for lunches with this sauce.

@Tracy in Virginia, USA: Hi Tracy, thanks for sharing the wonderful story about your daughter’s nursery dinners. Using the freezer is something I should do more of. I store stuff in the fridge, but as you point out, I don’t always reach it before it goes off.
Great to see you making some delicious “Use it up!” soups too!